Eleanor Rigby is the Beatles most cinematically bleak song, Back in the USSR its most joyfully energetic (complete with cracking Beach Boys pastiche), Helter Skelter the hardest-rocking, Blackbird – inspired by a Bach Bourrée – the gentlest (and the only one I’ve ever heard on Radio 3).Īs for A Day in the Life, that’s Lennon at his greatest, right? Yes, except it was McCartney who not only wrote the terrific, contrastingly jaunty middle section, but also, inspired by his new fascination with the classical avant garde, came up with the idea of those two nightmarishly exhilarating orchestral surges. Then, there’s the sheer, bewildering, infinitely influential variety of McCartney’s Beatles output, which completely shames any reputation he might have among the cloth-eared for being “merely” a writer of gorgeous tunes (as if that were such a crime anyway). Have you ever noticed, to take just two examples from a single album (Revolver), that in the verse of For No One, and chorus of Eleanor Rigby, almost every syllable is off the beat? But it is also the former Beatles bassist’s instinctive mastery of syncopation – more than Lennon, and absolutely up there with Scott Joplin – which means that there is always an invisible, propulsive, infinitely seductive tension between the beat of his songs and their melody. Why is this? It’s partly the at least apparent simplicity of McCartney’s songs, the unforced, organic ease of the melodic lines, which makes them incredibly attractive and easy to join in with. But a McCartney creation? That generates yet another level of shared enjoyment, every time. A John Lennon Beatles song, better still. The likes of Abba, Elton John and Queen all go down famously. I’ve learnt this especially from thirty-odd years of playing the piano in whatever bar, restaurant, hotel, house, outhouse, henhouse or doghouse will have me. Of the many facets of Paul McCartney’s greatness, perhaps the most fundamental is that no one, not even the mighty and much cooler Lennon, has ever been so good at writing songs that people want to sing. To be brutally honest, though, it has – and he was in the same band. John Lennon’s music has given me so much pleasure that it feels downright ungrateful to suggest pop music has ever known an even finer songwriter. Mark Monahan: Nothing generates shared enjoyment like a McCartney song

Paul mccartney michael jackson